Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

Sustainability -- And Marketing To Women -- Comes to Condoms

Though most condoms are aimed at men, with black or bright red packaging and, in the case of the leading brand, Trojan, a graphic of a Roman warrior, some 40% of condom buyers are women. The $1-billion-a-year condom market also pays no heed to politically correct notions about sustainable business practices or the environment.

Now a new company, Sustain, is trying to disrupt the condom business and appeal to women, while getting its latex from sustainability-certified forests and manufacturing in factories where workers are treated well. Relying on a total of $3 million in funding from some 30 investors and $600,000 raised through crowdfunding site CircleUpCircleUp, Sustain is gearing up to sell its female-centric prophylactics starting July 15, online and in stores like the natural pharmacy chain Pharmaca and Fred Meyer superstores in the Pacific Northwest. Sustain’s recycled cardboard boxes are colored a gentle teal and the individual wrappers have lavender, green and ochre photos of rounded pebbles, bamboo and sea urchin shells. The company’s founders: socially conscious business pioneer Jeffrey Hollender, 59, his lawyer wife Sheila, 59, and their NYU Stern business school grad daughter Meika, 26.

The Sustain story piqued my interest in part because I had a hard time imagining a dad and daughter working on a condom company together. Though I was very close to my father, I don’t think I ever spoke a word to him about my sex life and certainly not about birth control. I was also interested in Hollender, who cofounded Seventh Generation back in 1988. The Burlington, VT-based politically correct cleaning product company, which sells unbleached disposable diapers and sulfate-free dish soap (the name comes from an Iroquois saying about considering the impact of decisions on the next seven generations), grew to $150 million in sales. But in 2010 when the board disagreed with him about upping the employees’ stake in the company, it fired Hollender. He says he spent a year battling disillusionment before deciding with his wife and daughter to revive an idea he had years earlier (he had trademarked the name Rainforest Rubbers) to start a sustainable condom company. Yesterday Jeffrey, suntanned and dressed in an open-necked blue shirt, checked blazer and brown jeans, and Meika, wearing a cream-colored one-piece pantsuit and high-heeled sandals, dropped by my office to tell me about their plans for Sustain. This is an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation:

Susan Adams: How uncomfortable is it, as father and daughter, to work together in a sex product company?

Meika: My dad was the person in the household who I was most comfortable talking to about sex and sexual health. Not like detailed conversations.

Jeffrey: Some of them were pretty detailed.

Meika: One reason 25% of college students end up with a sexually transmitted disease is that parents aren’t providing an environment where they can talk to their kids about contraception.

Adams: What do Meika’s two siblings and mother think about the business?

Jeffrey: My wife Sheila is a co-founder and works with the company part-time, which creates other dynamics, and my daughter Chiara, 19, is a summer intern. We tried to get my son Alexander, the head designer for a fashion app, involved, but he said, “too much family.” Chiara is a musical theater major so this isn’t her dream internship.

Adams: If Jeffrey had the idea for a sustainable condom, who came up with the idea to market it to women?

Meika: Sheila definitely played a big role in that. Jeffrey was like, “we’ll market this as the most sustainable condom in the world.” But Sheila and I said we needed more than that and we kept coming back to the fact that 40% of condoms are purchased by women. At the same time our research confirmed that women hate buying condoms. And sustainability resonated more with women.

We want to start a movement. Only 19% of sexually active single women aged 22-44 use condoms regularly. We want 100%. We’ll never get to 100% but it blew my mind that my peers, 20-something, extremely successful, educated single women were not using condoms. Women think, I’m here to please the guy and if he’s not bringing up using a condom, we won’t. That’s what we want to change.

Adams: How will you convince women to buy Sustain condoms?

Meika: We organized a group of 500 women and asked them how they felt about the brands that are out there, where did they purchase condoms, where would they like to purchase them. We learned the packaging was critically important. We needed to come up with packaging that was really beautiful. Women say they would love to buy condoms online or buy them when they’re buying their personal care and beauty products. We’re targeting American ApparelAmerican Apparel and Urban Outfitters, where women can get more comfortable purchasing condoms and it isn’t in this fluorescently lit drugstore environment.

Also when we talk about sex [on Sustain’s blog, Facebook page and in its Twitter feed] we’re not being aggressive and in your face like a lot of the other brands out there. We’re being fun and clever and engaging people. Although we’re a sex product and we talk about sex a lot, every time we talk about it we talk about health and contraception. We want to make Sustain a really cool lifestyle brand, not just a condom brand.Adams: Who’s the boss?

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